Seyun and Ilyra came around the corner of the porch from the carpenter’s shed. Then, Daro Kesh paused with an oiled rag halfway down the flat of his short Jade sword. His cedar-braced right leg was still propped straight on the barley keg. The notch near the point of his blade—chipped on the Twelfth Night. Just then, he struck the lower returning plane to throw Keth Or clear. Glinted dull silver in the slanting sun.
Daro looked first at the unlacquered mountain-ash shaft of Ilyra’s rebuilt spear, then up at the open linen collar of Seyun’s tunic. There, the thin silver curve under the left collarbone had vanished into a flat, pale scar.
“So you two finally finished auditing the stove papers,” Daro remarked. He set his whetstone down on the bench plank. “I wondered why the yard got so quiet around noon.”
“The original fire logs matched his winter notebook to the breath, Master Kesh,” Ilyra said, grounding the butt of her plain ash shaft on the gravel. “And his conduct with the tablet left nothing to prosecute. We closed the first mark before Mina and Mother Renn.”
Daro leaned back against the porch post and studied Seyun with a mixture of gruff respect and pedagogical satisfaction. Beneath Seyun’s right collarbone, the second silver curve—sworn in Daro’s rented Oran rooms after the hundred-breath wrestling lodge contest—remained warm and clear, now the sole active rivalry mark in Seyun’s body.
